Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (46 page)

Names of rulers too are typically Sanskritic. Good examples are the more than thirty Cambodian kings whose names end in
-varman
, ‘bastion’, from
Jayavarman
, who died in AD 514, to
Śrīndrajayavarman
, 1307-27, and the Majapahit kings of Indonesia from
Rājasa
in 1222-7 to
Suhitā
, 1429—47.
^*

These led to many more Sanskrit place names, since it was customary to name a city after the king that founded it. To give one example among many dozens,
Śre
hapura
(literally ‘best of cities’), capital of Cambodia, was named after its founder, King
Śre
havarman
(’best bastion’). It is likely also that
Śri Vijaya
, the dominant kingdom in southern Sumatra, was named after a king named
Vijaya
, ‘Victorious’.

This is just a sample of some of the better known; as could be expected, the history of the relations of all these cities and kings over a thousand years is a vast and labyrinthine subject, and not one to be broached here.

It is easy to overlook what a major change the introduction of Sanskrit must have been for the local peoples. Sanskrit, as a type of language, was fearsomely different from the local languages, now classified as Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Sanskrit is polysyllabic, and highly inflected, with a complicated consonant system that is not averse to long clusters. Word order is free. This language was being taken up by speakers of other languages where words were short, often distinguished by tone, and made up of simple syllables with single consonants at beginning and end. Inflections were simple or absent, but word order was rigid. It was at least as radical a change as it would be to bring Japanese in as an elite language where previously everyone had known only English or Dutch. What a wrench it was can be seen in the mangled remains of some of the Sanskrit names:
Śrik
etra
came out as Thayekhettaya,
Śrī Deva
as Si Thep.

Nevertheless, the quality of written Sanskrit that the natives acquired in this part of the world deviated hardly at all from that of India. We do not see strong ‘substrate influence’ in the texts written here. Talking of Cambodia, R. C. Majumdar remarks that its inscriptions, known from AD 475 to 1327, are generally ‘composed in beautiful and almost flawless
kāvya
—i.e. poetic—style, and some of them run to great lengths… Almost all the Sanskrit metres have been successfully used in these verses, and they exhibit a thorough acquaintance with the most developed rules and conventions of Sanskrit rhetoric and prosody.’
³⁴
The inscriptions are also full of learned, even witty, allusions to the Vedas and all the different branches of Indian learning, especially grammar.

Particularly accomplished was Queen Indradevi, consort of Jayavarman VII (who ruled in Cambodia 1181—
c
.1218): she was a pious Buddhist and taught the Buddhist nuns of three convents. She has left an inscription, in praise of her younger sister, another scholar, who had sadly died young: it runs to 102 verses in several different metres.
³⁵

Some of the literature written in Indo-China joined the canon of Sanskrit classics. Vararuci’s
Sārasamuccaya
(’collection of essences’) could be hard hitting: to show how views can differ, he evokes a woman’s breast—seen by her child, and by her husband; and then her dead body, seen first by an ascetic, then by her lover, and then by a dog. Later on, he prefigures Pascal’s wager in his advice to the atheist (
nāstika
—literally the ‘isn’t-ist’): if there is no world after death, there is nothing to fear either way; but if there is, it will be the atheists who stand to suffer.
³⁶

Sanskrit texts apparently played an important role in the foundation of new Hindu cults, which might be founded to buttress newly independent states: so when Jayavarman freed Cambodia from Javanese control in the twelfth century, he invited a Brahman named
Hira
yadāma
(’Golden Cord’) to perform Tantric rites to guarantee this freedom, under its own ruler. The resulting cult of
Devarāja
(’god-king’) lasted for 250 years, explicitly based on four named
śāstra
texts. It could not have been done without Sanskrit, and the access to ancient wisdom that it implied.

The sense of numinous power infusing Sanskrit led on occasions to a sort of spiritual nostalgia. One king of Champa, Gangaraja, is said to have abdicated his throne so as to have the chance to give up the ghost on the banks of the Ganges. And, more public-spiritedly, there is evidence from an inscription put up at Vat Luong Kau in Laos that a king called
Śrī Devanīka
planned to set up a new
Kuruk
etra
at home as a substitute for the sheer holiness of the real
Kuruk
etra
north of Delhi. As the site of the
Mahabharata’s
great battle, it was peerless among shrines, but sadly inaccessible. He quotes the epic:

P
thivyā
Naimi
am pu
yam antarīk
e tu Pu
karam Trāyānām api lokānām Kuruk
etram viśi
yate.